This blog will present news items about the motion picture business, with emphasis on lower budget, independent film in most cases. Some reviews or commentaries on specific films, with emphasis on significance (artistic or political) or comparison, are presented. Note: No one pays me for these reviews; they are not "endorsements"!

About Me

Since the 1990s I have been very involved with fighting the military "don't ask don't tell" policy for gays in the military, and with First Amendment issues. Best contact is 571-334-6107 (legitimate calls; messages can be left; if not picked up retry; I don't answer when driving) Three other url's: doaskdotell.com, billboushka.com johnwboushka.com Links to my URLs are provided for legitimate content and user navigation purposes only.
My legal name is "John William Boushka" or "John W. Boushka"; my parents gave me the nickname of "Bill" based on my middle name, and this is how I am generally greeted. This is also the name for my book authorship. On the Web, you can find me as both "Bill Boushka" and "John W. Boushka"; this has been the case since the late 1990s. Sometimes I can be located as "John Boushka" without the "W." That's the identity my parents dealt me in 1943!

Saturday, June 20, 2015

“Out to Win”, a documentary by Malcolm Ingram (“Small Town
Gay Bar”, 2006), examines the gradual acceptance of gay and lesbian athletes in
professional sports. In very recent
years, major sports leagues have started to announce non-discrimination
policies.

While opening with an enactment of some old-style hate
rhetoric, the film soon moves to interving Dave Kopay, probably the first
professional football player to later come out.
But during his career, he was married and then lived clandestinely with
a lover who would die of AIDS (he apparently never became infected). To cover
up, he played the day of his partner’s funeral.

The second big narrative is baseball player Billy Bean, who
was a pretty effective utility player with some home run power for the Tigers,
Padres and Dodgers. But Bean eventually
left the game, rather than live in the closet, but today he works for MLB on
its diversity and inclusion programs. (On
the other hand all MLB teams offer paid paternity and parental leave to players
and employees.)

Curiously, the film
omitted the narrative of Glenn Burke (who would die of AIDS in 1995).

The biggest story is, of course, about Michael Sam, who got
picked in draft by the St. Louis Rams, washed out, and then also didn’t make a
tryout with the Dallas Cowboys. The film showed what the tryouts (at Lucas Oil
Stadium in Indianapolis) look like.

John Amaechi presents the issues for the NBA. Billy Jean King and Martina Navratilova speak
about the tennis circuit, and Martina had emigrated to the US from a Communist
country before announcing her lesbianism, which at the time could have been a
problem for legal status.

Toward the end, a high school football player and another
baseball player provide mutual support at an event in Portland OR.

The acceptance of LGBT people in sports follows the
acceptance in the military (with the repeal of “don’t ask don’t tell” in 2011,
which does not yet help with transgender), and gradual changes in the Boy
Scouts of America.

I remember hearing homophobic rhetoric about sports locker
rooms back in the 1970s in the workplace.
When I was living in Dallas in the 1980s, I knew someone who had been a
relief pitcher in the minors but had tested HIV positive. During the time I lived in Dallas he did not become
ill.

But the whole "locker room" and "showers" argument, as an analogue with the barracks privacy argument made by Moskos and Nunn for the military back in 1993, seems to have totally lost traction now. A younger generation does not care about this idea the way some people did thirty years ago.

The NBC soap “Days of our Lives” has a subplot about a gay
Major League baseball pitcher forced out by injury after living in the closet
and then coming out, creating a love triangle.

The best site I can find is here. The production companies are Brothers Double
and TCB.

The film was screened Friday night at Silverdocs at Landmark
E Street and it was at SXSW.

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